Slava Kim, a core developer at MDG, is building a rethinkdb integration with Meteor on both the server and the client. This video goes through and demos what he has done so far and it’s a great thing to see.

This is a set of packages built by Sashko Stubailo to help you build REST endpoints from any Meteor methods and publications you have available. The goal is for Meteor is be the easiest tool to build a REST API. I highly recommend adding this package to your Meteor app if you are looking to expose a REST API for your users or for your other applications built on the same server. You can also use this as a great selling point to help people convert over their current apps to Meteor and slowly transition to the DDP world. :)

There is a branch on Meteor called experimental-spacebars-over-react which is an integration of React and Blaze. It is being worked on by Avital and Evan at MDG. From what I can see, it is meant to be a very tight integration and seems to use React’s rendering engine over Blaze, but integrates with the rest of Blaze. I’m curious to see where this branch goes in the near future.

Updates in the Meteor Community

Ben Berman, from Workpop, talks with Paul Dowman about how Workpop went about building a native iOS app and how it integrates with their Meteor server. They talk about how they originally used the objective-ddp package, but then later switched to the meteor-ios package due to the extra features you get by using that integration instead. It is a very interesting interview and can give you a lot of insight on building a native mobile app with Meteor. I highly recommend listening to it.

You can now use MUP (Meteor-Up) on Windows and deploy to your servers easily. For those of you unfamiliar with MUP, it is an easy way to deploy your Meteor app to custom servers. If you want to learn more, read more here.

This is a fantastic new package that gives the user suggestions if they mistype the domain for the email address. So, if a user types in user@gnail.com it will suggest user@gmail.com to the user. It’s a simple package, but it can help your end users a lot.

This is a great article that shows you step-by-step on how you can build a simple cross-platform desktop application with Meteor and Electron. This is a great place to start and can hopefully shed more insight on how to build larger cross-platform apps with Meteor.

There was a React native & Meteor integration that used a iOS-based integration, but this one is using JavaScript DDP. What this means is that it is using a websocket polyfill to allow for this and allows you to communicate directly in the React Native JS code that you are writing with the Meteor server. This is great and a huge step for those trying to build native apps in React native without having to change from Meteor.

This is a great starter guide for Meteor developers that are on Windows. It goes through the basics and how to install and use Meteor on your Windows machine. It is a great resource to send to your developer friends that use Windows as their primary platform.

Sacha Greif talks about a lot of the changes coming up in Telescope. It is taking a whole architectural change by moving all of the code into packages and separating those packages into modular components so that developers can pick and choose what features they want to use in their telescope instance. I highly recommend watching this talk as he also answers questions that could be prevalent to your Telescope app today or in the future.

Note: The beginning of the video does not contain audio, but it does come in later. I believe there will be a new video uploaded for this talk containing the audio.

Martijn Walraven does a great talk at the Meteor SF devshop about how Meteor can be used to build native iOS apps. He talks about how he went about building meteor-ios package and the benefits of using DDP over typical HTTP calls to build your iOS applications faster. I highly recommend watching this portion of the devshop as it can help give you better insight on building native apps with a Meteor server in place.

This is a talk given by Ben Green, a Meteorite known for building various database packages, about his PostgreSQL package. He talks about the various implementations for it and how to use it. Ben also talks about how the MySQL and PostgreSQL packages work generally and what larger issues still need to be solved.

Upcoming Events

In this Meteor Hacks show, Justin (from MDG), will be joining Arunoda to talk about Docker, Meteor, and deployments. Justin works on Galaxy at MDG and has been doing a lot of experiments with Docker & Meteor. I think it will be a great show to watch.